Smut with substance?

If you haven’t heard anything yet about the book Wetlands – written by a German pop TV show host Charlotte Roche – hear this: it’s probably the most graphic and squeamish novel I’ve ever read. It beats J. G. Ballard’s Crash for shock value, it makes you blush more than Anais Nin, and (I’m told) it makes The Vagina Monologues look tame. But for all its boundary-breaking, the jury is out on exactly where the value is in reading Wetlands. Think you’ve read it all? Seen it all? Heard about it all? (Done it all?). Think again…

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The Great Gatsby - every word of it – is an unlikely theatrical success story. Jodie McLeod reports.*

Jim Fletcher as mystery man Jay Gatsby

SEVEN hours and 35 minutes is how long audiences will spend in the theatre when New York theatre company Elevator Repair Service presents Gatz in Sydney. The show, a verbatim performance of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel The Great Gatsby, is about five times longer than the average theatre production.

But Gatz’s director, John Collins, says length should not be off-putting. “There’s a special excitement and a sense of accomplishment that the audience feels when they leave the theatre and they’ve just heard an entire novel in one sitting,” he says.

Collins, who is also the company’s artistic director, originally wanted to trim the novel when he first began working on a stage adaptation in 1999 but quickly decided editing it was a no-no.

“The narrator’s thoughts are such a huge part of what makes this a great novel. And so that became the project: how would you stage a novel without rewriting or cutting it?”

Rugby or rock? Music muscles in on sport

Illustration: Rocco Fazzari

As pop culture grabs teenagers, music is becoming cooler than sport at school, writes Jodie McLeod.*

School used to be about the survival of the fittest. Where you ranked in the playground hierarchy was proportional to your speed, co-ordination and how good your legs looked in your sport shorts. But now the criterion of “cool” at school is changing. As a wider variety of opportunities are opened up to students in schools, and as the instruments of pop culture increasingly infiltrate teenagers’ lives – musical involvement (listening to it, supporting it or playing it) is becoming more a marker of greatness among peers than one’s ball skills.

TWITTER FOR TWATS: all your Twittery FAQs answered

MC Hammer is using it, so it must be cool. Here’s my take on the whos, whats and whys (so many whys…) of the social media phenomenon that is Twitter.

Fantasy Love Chair… the hottest seat in town!

I was pleasantly surprised on the weekend to discover that the only individual ever to have surfed the net and perchance stumble upon this blog did so after Googling the words “fantasy love chair”.

What is the best age to go travelling?

This is a tough one. Everyone who’s old says, “Do it while you’re young”; but when you’re young you think – “maybe I should wait till I’m old, when I’ve actually got money to do it, and do it well?” Of course you can travel when you’re young, middle aged and old, but not often do we get the chance in life to take a large chunk of time off – I’m talking a year or two – to do so. No matter how the question manifests – whether it’s a hypothetical or a realistic choice – the question has crossed everyone’s mind at some point. So if you did have to choose – which option would you take? Let’s look at the pros and cons…

Weaker sex fantasy: Another reason why women love Twilight

Fantasy is not my favourite literary genre. It was a struggle, I admit, for me to read The Hobbit, not to mention Harry Potter; and I didn’t even go near The Chronicles of Narnia. So when I heard about the next fantasy-series craze that was sinking its teeth into millions of readers around the world (of course, the Twilight series by Stephanie Meyer), I was about as excited as a vampire in a vege patch. But then I began to hear whispers that they weren’t your ordinary fantasy novels, and that what had Meyer’s mostly female readership hooked wasn’t spells and sorcerers, but the sexual tension between the main characters: the fact that they resist the urge throughout the entire circa 2000-page story to have ravenous vampiric sex.

Abstinence… exciting? My interest piqued, I decided it was time – two years after the book’s release – to break my ‘fantasy’ abstinence and find out what it was that made Meyer’s writing tick, or tickle, the fancy of millions of women readers.

You can’t shoot a fire

This is what I remember: solid twisters of smoke moving down the hill towards our house like giant stone statues; mum and dad running down the driveway in t-shirts and thongs carrying buckets and wet Hessian bags, telling me to stay inside… and then the wait.

I could see flames from the kitchen window.

I called my friend who lived three houses down. She was alone too.
What if the fire came into our backyards? she asked.
Duh… we would run.
But wouldn’t our mums want us to defend the house?
No – surely they would prefer us to live more than their kitchens. Mum doesn’t even like her dishwasher anyway.
So what things will you get before you run? What are your top three favourite things you would save?
Easy: my Dinky Diary, some jewellery out of Mum’s bedside drawer, and maybe the gun in the laundry.
You have a gun in your laundry?
Yeah, an old one Dad got from the army.
What do you need a gun for?
To defend us, of course.
… But you can’t shoot a fire, Jodie.

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ROBBED! The hidden cost of going to the movies

Everyone knows how to be stingy at the moment. You choose Coles brand over fancy labels, collect shop-a-dockets as though they were their own currency, and you buy that E10 eco fuel, which I’m convinced is designed to get the car only as far as the next petrol station. When it comes to entertainment, you rent DVDs on Tuesdays only, and on Saturday night you play Solitaire in the kitchen by candle light.

In the olden days (ie: the ’90s) going to the movies was the cheapskate’s night out of choice. ‘Movie’ could even be coupled with ‘dinner’ – to form the definitive date night concept ‘Dinner and a Movie’. But in modern times, the D&M idea is out, because – quite simply – you can’t afford it. The price of a movie ticket on its own is enough to make one wince, let alone the additional necessary expense of a choc top and a coke, which can easily come to a total of around $25.

But there is another price to pay for going to the modern day cinema that no amount of buying of Coles brand items can offset – and this money-sapper is called GETTING ROBBED.